What if a question's just a question?

And more from the communal shower

I took a shower with my daughters last Friday night. There was a razor leaning against a shampoo bottle that I was trying to access so I picked it up to get to the shampoo. Madeline asked what the razor was, so I told her it’s a tool people use to cut hair off their bodies.

She asked why. I explained that some people just choose not to have hair. That dad uses a razor to shave his face and sometimes when I don’t feel like having hair on my legs or my arms or my toes or on the arches of my foot, I use one to take the hair off too. 

She said, “Oh” and continued on, playing with the washcloth that was in her hands. It was such an honest and straightforward and even refreshing exchange. I’ve often heard parents say that their kids keep them honest. I wonder if this is because the way that kids ask questions — the curiosity they carry that is free of any agenda: no charge or motivated interpretation on the receiving end — is led by an innocent, basic desire to understand what they’re seeing. It invites you to respond just as genuinely. It kind of helps you know yourself better. 

I thought about how I would have answered if they were the ones who’d asked me why I don’t wear makeup. “Because most of the time, I think I look better without it. When I don’t feel that way, though, I do wear makeup.” 

I punched myself in the face, fistful of inflated pride, for delivering such an honest response to this hypothetical conversation taking place within the walls of my mind while water ran down the back of my exposed neck, eyes looking down at the soap suds melting into the blonde curls on Laura’s head. 

Eventually, the environment that surrounds a child begins to corrode the purity of their inquiry. The introduction of new variables: the influence of the schoolyard -- faces, feedback, misunderstanding -- adds a layer of motive to our observations and questions. And it stays with us. It’s like the pursuit of understanding for the sake of understanding gets lost in the zero-sum game of unspoken assumption. 

Woah, I’m sorry. I don’t know if this is inappropriate, but I just got so distracted by these boots open in another tab on my browser. I have no idea when the hell I’d wear them, much less where I’d go while in them, but I can’t unsee the vision of a pair of grey sweatpants creating a sort of souffle effect over the tops of the boot where they’d meet my knee and --

Where was I?

Ah, yes: asses, u and me. 

When do we stop wanting to understand for the sake of understanding? And what comes up in its place? Do we think we get so smart that we know everything and thus when we’re to ask questions they’re with the express intention of proving the inquired-to wrong? Or is it just kind of a defense -- I think you mean something you don’t actually mean when you ask what I did yesterday or vice versa, and then tense up before answering in this indirect fashion that barely addresses the question at hand.

This is totally learned behavior -- I remember this one time when I was 8 or 9 years old, waking up the morning after a sleepover at a new friend’s house and eating chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. It was the first time I’d ever had a pancake and when I got home, I asked my mom if she’d buy some. She said no and I asked why so she said dolma (stuffed grape leaves) and feta cheese -- the choice breakfast of my Middle Eastern parents on the mornings when the abudaraho (bottarga) was done -- are a perfectly good breakfast. It’s true, but it totally missed the point of my question -- like, didn’t answer it at all. Which left a lot of room for me to start making assumptions. 

And when you’re a proficient enough storyteller or at least one in training, you can make yourself believe just about anything. 

So we didn’t have pancakes because grape leaves are better (even though I prefer the former): I don’t know what’s good. What I want is irrelevant: I’m not good enough. And I ask dumb questions. 

I don’t know why I was so mean to myself, I wonder if there was a defensiveness about the way my mom answered when I asked stuff like this because it accentuated how hard she and my dad were trying to blend in, build a “normal American experience” for themselves and their kids. Even though, honestly, did they actually want that? We were eating cured fish roe for breakfast! But anyway, I interpreted it all in this pretty self-sabotaging way. 

I used to say that I started Man Repeller when I was 21-years-old to find freedom. Recently I have wondered if the freedom I desired was mostly from the shackles of these stories. From myself. If I have spent so much time living inside my interpretation of reality — calculating what my mom or my friend or my husband or the grocer means they say x or do y or gesture that and brush off this -- that I’ve missed the real picture.

It’s like if we’re looking at the same one and it’s of a red car, I see a runaway and you see a run-towards and when asked what’s in the frame, we have no idea what the other means even though we can both see, and clearly, it’s a red car.

Just like a razor is a razor -- it cuts off hair.

Lately I’ve had this fantasy of running naked across a field full of all these different kinds of flowers — tulips and pansies and hyacinths and marigolds with their totally different needs thriving in this one field. I think it represents intellectual terrain that supports, even encourages the proliferation of divergent thought. The pursuit of understanding for the sake of it: looking at a person I don’t know, or like, or who I plainly disagree with and saying, “I have no idea how the fuck you got to be the way you are, but do you want to get a drink and talk about it?”